Price comparison websites are commonly thought to benefit consumers by increasing competitive pressure between firms, in turn lowering prices faced by consumers. This article investigates the impact of the introduction of a PCW or ‘web aggregator’ to the market for a homogeneous good. We...

This paper compares standard and local projection techniques in the production of impulse response functions both theoretically and empirically. Through careful selection of a structural decomposition, the comparison continues to an application of US data to the textbook ISLM model. It is argued...

Simple plurality election systems (commonly known as `First-Past-The-Post`) are often associated with the dominance of two political parties. Such systems tend to reward leading parties with too many seats (known as the `mechanical` effect) and provoke tactical voting, where voters switch away...

In a Lucas-Phelps island economy, an island has access to many informative signals about demand conditions. Each signal incorporates both public and private information: the correlation of a signal׳s realizations across the economy determines its publicity. If information sources differ in...

In a plurality-rule election, a group of voters must coordinate behind one of two challengers in order to defeat a disliked status quo. Departing from existing work, the support for each challenger must be inferred from the private observation of informative signals. The unique equilibrium...

In the context of a "beauty-contest" coordination game (in which pay-offs depend on the quadratic distance of actions from an unobserved state variable and from the average action), players choose how much costly attention to pay to various informative signals. Each signal has an underlying...

Party activists wish to (i) advocate the best policy and yet (ii) unify behind a common party line. An activist`s understanding of his environment is based on the speeches of party leaders. A leader`s influence, measured by the weight placed on her speech, increases with her judgement on policy...

Collective action problems arise in a variety of situations. The economic theory of public good provision raises a number of important questions. Who contributes to the public good, and who free rides? How might a social planner exploit the interdependence of decision-making to encourage...